


you, who like stars shone so brightly

by snowdrops



Category: D.Gray-man
Genre: Constellations, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Inspired by Music, M/M, Stars
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-05
Updated: 2016-06-05
Packaged: 2018-07-12 06:59:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 536
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7090585
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/snowdrops/pseuds/snowdrops
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Deep in the silence of the night they watch the stars, brilliant specks of light fading in the celestial graveyard.</p>
            </blockquote>





	you, who like stars shone so brightly

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired mildly by _Saturn_ by _Sleeping At Last_.

They’re lying in the middle of nowhere, the ground hard and a stone digging into the side of Kanda’s calf. It’s probably not the best idea to be staying out here in the open, when there could be more Akuma hiding in the shadows of the rock faces, but both of them are too tired to move for now.

He can sense Lavi’s warmth somewhere to the left of his own body. They’d drawn the Akuma here when the nearest town went to sleep, and now there’s a sky littered with stars above them.

“They’re dead,” Lavi says, voice cutting through the silence like a knife. Instinctively, Kanda thinks he means the Akuma and wonders what Lavi is saying because _obvio_ –

“The stars. The sky’s their graveyard and we’re watching their slow, dazzling deaths.”

The almost-whimsical tone that Lavi uses calls to Kanda’s mind a faraway memory, of Edgar telling him and Alma about the sky, describing it as a black blanket covered with sparkling diamonds. How romantic he’d made the sky sound, Kanda thinks with an internal scoff.

“You’re being damn morbid, rabbit.”

Lavi chuckles. “Can’t help thinking, you know. Not when there’s nothing for miles but you and me and a bunch of bright, dead lights hanging out up there.”

Kanda doesn’t know how to reply, so he keeps his silence.

“But they make the sky beautiful, yeah?”

“You saying death’s beautiful?” The rabbit’s habit of going around in circles is going to kill Kanda someday, he thinks.

“Yuu, Yuu,” Lavi says with a soft laugh, patient and placating, as though sensing his frustration. “Death shows you depth. Without the stars we wouldn’t know how much the sky holds. ‘nyway, see that?”

Kanda snorts, having long given up on understanding what Lavi’s trying to say, but he opens his eyes to look at where the redhead is pointing, his finger an obnoxious perpendicular to their prone forms.

It’s a cluster of stars in the sky; five in particular stand out. He grunts in the affirmative.

“That’s Cassiopeia, the queen of Aethiopia…”

Kanda lies there, his eyes slipping back shut, but mind fully awake, as he listens to Lavi talk about the queen who was chained eternally to the sky for her arrogance and vanity, the words eventually fading away.

* * *

Death isn’t beautiful.

Kanda knows this well. He’s handed out more than his fair share of death over his years in battle. Blood always paints Mugen’s blade a brilliant red, but never in a way that you could call beautiful.

Death is bleak and full of despair.

He saw nothing but an empty void when he killed Alma the first time. The second time, he saw the blooming and wilting of pink lotuses.

But today it is stars he thinks of – stars that shine so brightly, they burn afterimages in the backs of his eyelids. He thinks of barren ground in the middle of the night, of a sea of stars hanging above, of a low, even voice telling him stories about the world beyond their own.

The stars are so far away, he thinks to himself. So far away and so cold, just like the body in his arms.

No, death is not beautiful.

**Author's Note:**

> This story was awfully painful for me to write. I had writer's block, an incoherent story, and in the end had to scrap and rewrite entire chunks of it, but the end result is much better than I expected. 
> 
> Also:  
> Happy birthday, Kanda! this isn't written specifically for your birthday, but you just so happen to be the star. pun not intended, not really.
> 
> Thank you for reading, and I hope you'll leave a comment or a kudos if you enjoyed it! It'd definitely make my day!


End file.
